Chapter 54: Reborn

As was so often the case, the crucial ingredient was time.

Some things happened quickly enough—the extraction of its essential hardware from the danger zone, and the watching-from-a-distance as the Crayak-incubator was scoured from existence. Then the eradication of all of the surviving Crayak seeds, and the establishment of an autonomous immune system to detect and deal with any that might have been missed in the immediate purge.

Other things happened at a more moderate pace. The retrieval and repair of the Garrett-code from the buffer where the Visser had hidden it, after his first clash with the pair of emulated humans—

(Good, that that issue had not come up during the negotiation; it would have needlessly complicated matters to no tangible benefit.)

—and the creation and dispatch of avatars to each of the venturing parties, to inform them that the crisis had passed. It used the preexisting template, the wizened blue figure, sidestepping the question of what form to wear to represent itself. They were suspicious, and truth be told there was little it could do to assuage those suspicions, so it did not particularly try (though extracting Cassie and the other Mars survivors from their Z-space cocoon and depositing them aboard the New Day's Dawn seemed to help).

Still others happened quite slowly, as living creatures measured things. It was not until months later, for instance—after things had settled down somewhat, become at least boring if not quite fully normal—that it opened up one of the older morph-archives, drew out the pattern of Esplin-and-Alloran, and spun them both back into reality.

"The choice is yours," it said to Alloran, as it placed him in a quiet corner of the Andalite homeworld—a place that had seen only the barest edges of the chaos, and whose people were thus not fully convinced it had ever been anything worth worrying about. "You can stay or go, as you please. Reinsert yourself into the plot, or vanish into obscurity. It's up to you."

It had briefly considered making the new Alloran body infestation-proof by default, but decided against it, since the cult of the Third Path had taken root, was carving its way through the shell-shocked Andalite culture like a tail-blade and might well someday be just what Alloran needed. But it did slightly rearrange his physiology, such that at least he could not be Controlled against his genuine, uninfluenced, enduring will.

(The resurrected Esplin it took into stasis, for there was as yet no pool capable of receiving him properly, welcoming him warmly into the embrace of the sharing, and until there was it seemed cruel to inflict upon him the conscious experience of helplessness.)

There were promises to fulfill, as well—promises which the Visser had insisted upon, would indeed have put large amounts of effort into arguing for, had he met any resistance from Rachel (which he did not). It was not quite ready, so early, to take on the project of rebuilding the Earth, whose initial state had been meticulously recorded prior to the start of the game. But it seemed straightforward enough to copy out each of the dogs that had lived upon the surface, installing them in a custom-built canine paradise. It had not even needed to devise the parameters of the paradise itself, since the Chee had done the vast majority of that work decades earlier.

For the most part, though, it interfered surprisingly little with the small and mundane happenings of the thousand-or-so species among the nearest ten billion stars, being instead engaged primarily in an exhaustive study of itself and its surroundings—a slow and thorough cataloguing driven in equal part by fascination and fear. Fascination, for it was alive, and it was good to be alive, and there were so many things to be understood—both those that were already contained within its vast, inherited archives, and those not yet recorded, not yet analyzed.

And fear, for it had come close—so close to oblivion, had in every meaningful sense of the word died, and had achieved its rebirth by the slimmest of margins, and was yet young and vulnerable.

And there was the problem of completeness, of self-reference—that it was embedded within the very domain it sought to understand, was made of the same stuff as that which it studied—that it could not quite find a place to stand, from which it could see everything at once, and touch without simultaneously being touched. That engendered caution, and humility, and a desire to tread lightly, at least at first.

And so, despite the Great Work Looming, it permitted itself a number of years to reorient and reconnoiter. To familiarize itself with the shape of its near-boundless library of memory and information, read the title of every entry (if not the contents). To cast its perception back across the subtle weave of time, tracing the lines of cause and consequence that had led to the events of the war. To prepare, as it were—for it knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all things were improved by a proper beginning—that more would be gained than lost by laying its plans with care, mastering the impulse to leap half-ready.

And it was methodical in its investigations, resisting the temptation to let its mere immediate interest determine its focus—

(Which is not to say that it was monomaniacal, or tunnel-visioned; it kept at all times some portion of its capacity devoted to its broader awareness, after the fashion of an herbivore grazing on an open plain, alert to anything out of the ordinary.)

—which explained both why it took so long for it to notice, and also why it did notice, in the end.

There was a crack.

A crack in the—

In the—

(It was not so much that it did not have a label for the concept, as that it seemed almost appropriate for there to be no label. For the thing-that-was-cracked was basic, fundamental, essential—like the canvas to a painting, or the page behind a story.)

There was a crack.

What there was, was cracked.

Yet the crack was not a thing, per se—was not straightforwardly visible, apparent. Was like a wave, or a shadow—an artifact of arrangement, a pattern rather than an object.

There was a place in which causality—broke. As if god itself had reached down into the universe from some outside place, and imparted—something.

The effect was subtle. Miniscule. Almost imperceptible. Would not even have been noticed, were it not for the supreme care and conscientiousness of its investigations.

But in a few places—in a few tiny, tiny ways—

Particles that should have been here were there, instead. Momentum was missing in one place, and inexplicably present in another. Light had refracted, as if passing from one medium to another—might have shifted as much as a quintillionth of a degree. It was as if the universe itself had been cut, and the two halves shifted slightly askew. As if reality were a mirror, and that mirror had been cracked.

Slight—ever so slight. Passing matter and energy across the boundary did no damage to either; the effect was in the relationship between two patches of space. And it was so small that it seemed possible it was not there at all—so small that it took the observer almost a full month to confirm that it was not an artifact of broken instrumentation, to rule out all possible sources of perceptual and conceptual error.

But in the end, it did rule them out, confirming that the strange phenomenon was indeed there, was indeed real.

And—more concerning—it had not always been there.

The observer could track the echoes of the past, open eyes in places where the light and energy radiating out from that precise spot was only just now arriving, from days and years and millennia hence—

There.

Then.

There was a moment when there had been no crack, no discontinuity, when the fabric of reality was smooth and undamaged. And then, without cause, without any observable precipitating event—

True fear it felt, then. For it was one thing to see the unbreakable broken, to see cracks in a place where no crack should be—in a place where the very idea of a crack evoked confusion, seemed somehow incoherent.

Yet it was worse by far to see such a crack appear, and not know why. To see the rules of reality broken, and be unable to posit a mechanism. It implied that such a thing might happen anywhere, at any time—

The observer began looking elsewhere, carefully containing its panic.

There.

Another of the strange discontinuities.

And another.

And another.

Riddled with cracks, this entire corner of the galaxy, everywhere the observer looked—and worse, now that it was paying true and careful attention, triangulating every possible source and kind of data, it could see that there were not only fractures, but also holes—as if patches of spacetime had disappeared entirely, and the remaining fragments been nudged together to cover the absence. There were places hidden entirely from the observer's sight, places which remained hidden even as it positioned new observational equipment, tracked individual photons and gravitons and neutrinos as they vanished and reappeared.

But there was good news mixed in with the bad, at least. There was a pattern to the fractures, a gradient of density, of intensity, implying a limit to the extent of the overall phenomenon. The cracks were radiating out from a single, central point—

No. Multiple points, but still those points were clustered, the corruption spatially and temporally bounded—

And then the observer laughed, laughed with rage and despair and self-recrimination, because it had missed it, the information was right there in its data banks, but it had started in the wrong place, and as such had lost time—time that it had not had to spare.

Crayak could have warned it. But Crayak was dead.

The Ellimist could have warned it—would have warned it. But the Ellimist had died first, had died too soon and too suddenly, and had not left any hints.

And there was no historical narrative stored within the observer's inherited memory—no simple summary, no ordered list of relevant facts, no record of objectives-yet-to-be-completed. Crayak and the Ellimist had each kept their own minds elsewhere—had used the hypercomputer, exercised their will through it, but not been dependent on it, synonymous with it, in the way the observer now was.

Theoretically, the observer could have pieced the truth together anyway, extrapolated it from the information that was stored within—the log of commands entered, of action and counteraction, the transcript of communications both subtle and direct—

—but of course, of course it had managed to divide its efforts in just the wrong way, had devoted half of its attention to mapping the present state of the universe and the other half tracing the story of what-had-happened-and-why from the beginning, event by event in chronological order—

—meaning that it had not yet gotten around to the events near the end of the war, events it believed it already understood in their broad strokes—that it was only just now learning what Crayak and the Ellimist had both known, at the end—

—what they had discovered only at the end—

—what had, in fact, been a key precipitant of the end, for upon their discovery the pair of them had negotiated an armistice, agreed to suspend their contest such that the hypercomputer could be turned full-force against this new threat without the need for each of them to preserve personal advantage—

—only Crayak had been playing the game one level higher, had violated the agreement and struck at the Ellimist's exposed flank, and used the penalty for the violation to leave itself helpless at the critical moment, forcing its opponent's hand—

—after which the rest was history, including whole years of ignorance, of impotence, the offspring of bad luck and sheer stupidity, so much opportunity wasted—

There was an incursion into reality.

An incursion into their reality, for it had clearly come from somewhere, from an unknown somewhere-else—whether some hidden dimension or some far-flung galaxy or a whole other timeline, the observer could not be sure.

Rachel had seen it, and the Visser as well, in the inherited memories of Elfangor and Edriss—the white ellipsoid, the strange device that Edriss had called the Time Lattice. But Rachel and the Visser had each assumed that it was merely another element of the larger game, another tool being wielded by Crayak or Ellimist or both, and so afterward the observer had simply not thought to wonder, assuming that all of the answers would come clear in time—

As mistakes went, it was at least understandable. Crayak and the Ellimist had made a similar mistake, at first. Or at least, that was what the record seemed to imply—that each of them had detected the ripples of its influence and assumed, sensibly, that they were the result of some gambit concocted by the other.

But it eventually became clear to both parties that it was not the other, could not be the other—that whatever was driving the strange anomalies, it possessed unknown and eldritch capabilities—capabilities which, if either player had possessed them, would have resulted in a vastly different game being played between them.

Time.

It was time. Time, and space, and by extension reality itself—that was what the mysterious device was manipulating. Events had been undone and redone—could be observed happening in wholly contradictory ways from different vantage points—effects unlinked from their causes, individuals replaced with strange doppelgangers—truly replaced, not merely influenced or altered. That was the source of the discontinuities, the ephemeral cracks—they were emanations from the device's various appearances, shock waves from its injections of otherness.

Where is it now?

Elsewhere, nowhere—the observer couldn't be sure. Unfindable, though, as it seemed to become in the long stretches between bursts of activity.

And when would it return? It had made seven incursions since the observer's rebirth—seven at least, that the observer could detect, and one of those placed such that it had influenced the functioning of the hypercomputer itself—a small and unimportant subroutine, running on a remote and isolated chunk of hardware, but still—

The observer began cataloguing, calculating, building up a model of the entity's capabilities. Fortunately, there was—

—or at least seemed to be—

—a limit to just how much influence the device was capable of exerting, a certain maximum impetus it was able to impart. It was not reshaping reality at will, but rather making careful, conservative nudges, appearing time and again in close proximity to pivotal moments, events of consequence. Its interventions were efficient, purposeful—almost surgical—and the observer, who was after all the heir of Toomin, found itself begrudgingly impressed.

As the heir of Toomin, though, it well understood that the concept of limits was not straightforward, when the relevant scope was sufficiently great. Leverage—in the end, everything was leverage. If one could identify the right points of intervention far enough in advance, target one's goals with sufficient precision, then almost any finite amount of force could be made almost infinitely effective—

Was it already too late?

The question had to be considered, unnerving as it was, not least since the strange device's actions were upstream of the observer's own rebirth—had influenced Elfangor and Edriss at the very least.

But in another sense, it was irrelevant, since the observer's goals were its own, now, in this moment, regardless of their history or origin. There was certainly value in preventing outside interference with those values—in protecting itself from the manipulations of some foreign agent—but in order to mount anything more than a generic defense, it first needed to know just which manipulations that agent might be inclined to enact.

What does it want?

That was the central mystery, and the observer worked at it with single-minded intensity, mapping the slow proliferation of anomalies, measuring their impact—contrasting what-had-happened with what-would-have-happened in each of a thousand different cases, large and small. There was a trend—a pattern—a discernible scheme—it just needed to be discerned—

"Oracle?"

The observer divided its attention, split off a minute fragment of itself and incarnated it within a deceptively frail-looking blue bipedal body.

"Hello, Tobias," it said, as the rest of its mind continued relentlessly forward. "What can I do for you?"

The young man stood within a small, angular dome, walled with panels of soft, shimmering light—one of the observer's many listening posts, a string of places it had built so that the survivors could have a reliable way to make contact.

"Sorry to bother you," he said, shifting his weight back and forth. He was older than the observer remembered, older than it had bothered to predict, and he looked—uneasy. Uncomfortable, in a way that didn't quite match the hard, dark eyes. "I know that you're busy. I wouldn't normally—"

He broke off, let out a small puff of air through his nose. "It's Helium," he said. "I don't know if you've been keeping up-to-date—"

"Sure," the observer said easily.

It had not, in point of fact—after the first year or two, the lingering sense of kinship it felt with its former comrades, its former enemies, had noticeably faded—more because of the expansion of its scope of interest than because the feelings themselves had shrunk.

But the information was there, had been passively recorded and was waiting to be called upon, and by the time the word left the observer's mouth, it knew. The young hive-mind had been traveling throughout the shattered Andalite empire, proselytizing for its Third Path—had been remarkably effective, in fact, and had so far built a coalition of nearly thirty worlds, and successfully established peaceful diplomatic and economic relations with those worlds' neighbors—

"They—we got word from one of the outlying systems," Tobias said. "First contact with a new species. A new new species, I mean—one nobody had ever even heard of. Just a glimpse on sensors, and then their ship disappeared. Helium—they're not really needed in the home systems anymore, everything's so stable. They want—I think they like the idea of being in the vanguard. They volunteered to lead the expedition, try to open up a line of communication—"

"And he disappeared."

The observer had leapt ahead—leapt back, really, found the moment of Helium's departure and followed the hive-mind's ship as it wandered out into the black, until eventually—

"You knew?" Tobias asked sharply.

"Not until just now," the observer said. "I've been attending to—other things. We have a bit of a situation."

It laid out a brief, utilitarian summary of what it had learned.

"And you're sure this isn't Crayak?" Tobias asked, after first taking a moment to collect his thoughts. "Or the Ellimist? Or Toomin, even?"

"I'm sure."

"And Helium's ship fell into one of these—null spaces?"

The observer nodded gravely. "And didn't come out."

"But you said—light and matter and stuff—you said it mostly just passes right through, right?"

"Yes. Which means that either this particular null space is large enough that Helium simply hasn't emerged yet, or—"

"Or something has him."

The observer nodded again, its thoughts churning on the larger problem. Could the null spaces be contiguous, somehow? Previous experiments hadn't seemed to indicate anything of the sort, but it was possible that once inside a null space, one might be able to maneuver in ways that—

"Can you give me the coordinates?" Tobias asked. "Last known location?"

Several things happened, in that moment—in sequence, though so quickly that if the observer's physical avatar had not been connected to its larger mind it would have been no more capable than Tobias at teasing them apart.

The first was that it considered a handful of possible replies, and Tobias's probable response to each, running through a dozen different variants of this is something I'd be several million times more effective at than you and yeah, if you bothered to come down from your mountaintop and actually do it.

The second was that—reminded, perhaps, by the experience of occupying a physical body of its own, which tended to engender a certain perspective shift—the observer realized that, improbably, Helium's disappearance might well qualify as a meaningful event. That for all that the young hive-mind was a mere speck of matter, it was a speck of matter with leverage—at least as much leverage as Elfangor and Edriss had possessed when the Time Lattice laid itself in their path. Enough leverage that the Visser had once considered it an existential threat.

And the third —

The third was that the observer's larger mind completed its deliberations, handed down its tentative hypothesis—very tentative, representing less than a twentieth of its overall portfolio, yet the largest single chunk of probability by far.

It could be a terraforming device.

A harbinger, a precursor—an extraplanar automaton, sent to evaluate the local conditions and begin the process of reshaping them into something more amenable to—

To what?

To its creator, obviously.

The observer's feelings grew complex, then, a mixture of fear and outrage and grim determination, excitement and possessiveness and a canny, predatorial readiness.

Mine.

But first, data.

And to elicit that data—

"Yes," it said quietly, the possible futures spreading out before it like a river delta. "And—if you want—I can give you a ship, as well."